These recipes are a collection that grows as I cook so come back and see the site again as I add to it.

These are all real recipes that I have prepared myself for that night and the following two nights and eaten at work, on the night shift, and they have therefore been tested under real-life conditions.

At home, you need a little time, at work, you just need a microwave oven.

* Atta is Chakki Atta - finely ground wholemeal flour - Maida is strong white plain (bread-making) flour - Urad is from lentils.Note that a lot of these vary somewhat between various people and you might find that some people use a different flour or fill an otherwise plain faltbread instead (or vice versa). It doesn't matter.

** Paratha see the Notes on Parathas page for more details on different ways of doing parathas and their advantages.

You should be able to eat proper food at work and whilst the recipe pages elsewhere on this site show you how to make good food, they are not necessarily tailored to the sort of environment you get in the work place.

Ideally, you should be able to:

Food for the work place can be a fairly tight specification. It needs to:

make a three-day-sized batch of food, storing it in three, air-tight containers;

keep them in the refrigerator, maintaining their seal;

take them out to use them over the next three days/nights; and,

enjoy them.

be tasty;

be the right amount for a lunch and not too filling (after you have eaten, you still need to be able to do whatever they are paying you for);

not be too complex to produce;

last for three days in a refrigerator (water migration is a major consideration here); and,

survive reheating in a microwave oven in the case of hot meals.

If you follow the above recipes, you should get a feeling for how these ingredients work together and what their roles are. To illustrate this, I have included an example of a variant of samosas and another example as a variant of parathas...

These demonstrate how you can look at ingredients and substitute others whilst preserving their roles - substituting ajwain with mint for example.

Of course, food that has animal ingredients in it (such as milk, eggs, meat and so on) will not last as long or be of such a reliable quality (in terms of microbiology that will harm you) when you buy it, as food that has no such ingredients in so, all of these recipes are vegan.

Also, my preference for interesting food is located geographically around East and South Asia so we are looking at using Chinese, Japanese, Thai and Indian ingredients although I do enjoy Mexican and Italian food as well.

Also, where fresh is available, I would prefer that over dried/preserved unless doing so is not very practical - noodles for example - or dried is the better option (powdered dried turmeric in onion bhajis for example).

Penultimately, I like my food hot so I use a fair amount of chillies but you are at liberty to use smaller amounts if you wish.

Finally, I haven't got any food allergies that I know of so I'm not making any special deviations away from what I would like here, although, of course, if you have an allergy to milk products or eggs or their derivatives, then this is ideal for you.